Balkanized Memories

These films are not about war.

Contrary to most material created regarding the post-Yugoslav Balkan states over the course of the last thirty years, my intention in programming them was not to address what happened in the 1990s in a political or historical sense so much as to share stories about how all of us, throughout the region and in our vast global diaspora, continue to experience what happened then now. These are films about how we live in the aftermath, how the fibres of our lives are coloured for too many generations with the violences of war. 

There is nothing in our species’ existence quite like it in terms of the intensity of the harm caused as well as in the collective nature of the experience. Those of us who have been indelibly touched within our own lifetimes by its eruption in our communities know that it is not only a physical destruction that occurs in war, but also a symbolic, psychological, and moral one: along with infrastructural collapse and grave human loss, we also endure the destruction of our systems of values, of our very sense of meaning and of ourselves, of language, of truth, of our trust in each other, or, in fact, in humanity itself. My intention was to select films whose filmmakers and whose subjects model for us what moving in the direction of moral courage might look like, with the often obfuscated notion of truth as their moral compass to guide the way in this impossible morass.

History and memory, politics and society, are told through the lens of ordinary, everyday lives in these films: in people’s most intimate moments in their homes, within their families, in the art that they make and the sense that they try to make of it all, in the ruined buildings and in the very landscapes themselves that whisper of what they know. Whether we choose to listen or not, these films amplify those whispers.

These films are not about the past.    

They are about the shadow of it in the present. What do we do today with all that once was? Our memories are balkanized. How do we continue moving toward an uncertain future, within a fractured present, with the bone-deep knowledge of such horror? With our wounds so exposed and unhealed, for so many unrecognized and unreconciled, unresolved, unaddressed? What new meanings can possibly come from such absurdity as war? How do we, now, locate our own moral compass when previous generations have let it slip through their hands? How do we dig it up from the muddied bottom of the river so that we may leave in our own wake the possibility of a future that looks different than today? These films are for that future.

These films are not only about the Balkans.   

These stories are all rooted in the particular place that I call home–or, better put, in my own lack of that home my elders and ancestors built in Yugoslavia that had already ceased to exist before I could learn to know it as such–but there is nothing geographically unique about their universal core. You could transpose these stories into many other geographies–yes, even your own–and the same questions I hope to pose would resonate. 

If we've learned nothing over the course of the last two years, I hope that at least we now know that egregious harm anywhere is egregious harm everywhere in this global world. And, speaking from the diaspora: we bring the wounds with us wherever we go. May we also bring with us a sense of interconnection to other people’s stories and experiences and may we all have the courage that these filmmakers and their subjects have to face our own hard questions in our own places, wherever we are.

Aurora Prelević
Writer, translator, programmer, cinephile